How to write a resume: seven steps, from contact line to proofread

Step 1: What goes in the contact line?

Your name, largest on the page, then one line of contact details: phone, a professional email address, your city and country, and a link to LinkedIn, a portfolio or code if it shows real work. A full street address is not needed.

Leave out date of birth, marital status and a photo unless the country or employer expects them. Put the contact line in the body of the page, not in a header graphic, so a parser reads it.

Step 2: How do you write a resume summary?

Two or three lines: what you do, the level you do it at, what you are strongest in, and what you want next. Write it last, once the rest of the page tells you what is worth summarising.

Make it specific to you. “Hard-working team player” describes anyone; “Data analyst with three years in retail pricing, strongest in SQL and experiment design” describes one person. If you are a student, a single line on what you study and the role you are looking for is enough.

Step 3: How do you write experience bullet points?

List roles newest first, each with job title, employer, location and dates. Under each, write three to six bullets. A strong bullet has three parts: what you did, how big it was, and what changed because of it.

• Action: open with a specific verb, such as built, led, cut, negotiated or redesigned, rather than “responsible for”.
• Scope: the size of the thing, such as the team, the budget, the number of users, accounts or sites.
• Result: what improved, by how much or by when. Use a real number when you have one; when you do not, name the concrete outcome.
• Example: “Rebuilt the month-end close checklist across four entities, cutting the close from eight working days to five.”
• Use the past tense for finished roles and the present tense only for the job you hold now.
• Keep each bullet to one or two lines, and put the most relevant one first.

Step 4: Which skills should you list?

List skills a reader can check: tools, languages, methods, certifications, spoken languages. Group them under short labels, such as Languages, Tools and Methods, so they scan quickly. Leave out soft skills as bare words; show them in your bullets instead.

Use the exact names the job description uses, where they are true of you. If it says “financial modelling”, write that, not only “Excel”.

Step 5: How should you list education?

Degree, institution, location and dates, newest first. Add a grade or CGPA when it is strong or when the employer asks for it, and relevant modules, a thesis or honours when you are early in your career. Once you have a few years of experience, education moves below experience and shrinks to one line per qualification.

Step 6: How do you tailor a resume to a job description?

Keep a full master résumé, and make a copy for each application. Then, for each job:

• Read the job description and mark the skills, tools and duties it repeats
• Make sure each of those that is true of you appears on the page, in the employer’s own words
• Move the most relevant bullets to the top of each role, and cut ones that do not serve this job
• Adjust the summary so its first line answers what this employer is hiring for
• Run a keyword check against the job description and close the real gaps, never by adding words that are not true

Step 7: How do you proofread a resume?

Errors are the easiest reason to set a résumé aside, and the easiest to remove.

• Read it aloud, slowly, once on screen and once on paper
• Check every date, job title and employer name against the facts
• Check consistency: one date format, one tense per role, one style of bullet
• Make sure your email and phone number are correct and that every link opens
• Ask someone else to read it; they will find what you skim past
• Save the final file under your name, such as Firstname-Lastname-Resume.pdf

How can CVAurum help with each step?

Open an example close to your role and replace its content with yours, or import your current PDF, a scanned one included, so you start from what you already have. The ATS check scores the page as you type: it flags bullets with no number, weak opening verbs, bullets that run past two lines and finished roles written in the present tense, and it matches your page against a pasted job description to show which terms are present and which are missing. The same check works on any PDF at the ATS resume checker.

Examples worth reading for bullet style: Product Manager, Registered Nurse, Data Analyst, Senior Accountant and Customer Success Manager.